An artist’s rendering of HD 219134 b, another ‘local’ Earth-sized exoplanet that could be similar to the newly discovered world
An international team of researchers searching for transiting exoplanets has made its latest discovery: an Earth-sized body just 72 light years away from us. K2-415 b, as the newly discovered world has been named, orbits the nearby red dwarf star K2-415. Researchers identified the exoplanet in the data of NASA’s now-defunct Kepler space telescope, its secondary mission K2 and its successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. While K2-415 b isn’t the closest known exoplanet to Earth, it is one of our close neighbours on a cosmic scale. And it’s a particularly intriguing exoplanet for astronomers to study.